Would You Like a Helping of Tolerance and Empathy with that Easter Dinner?
Red and yellow black and white they are precious in his sight Jesus loves the little children of the world. Lyrics C. Herbert Woolston (1856-1927); Music: George F. Root (1820-1895) (MIDI, score). Root originally wrote this tune for the American civil war song Tramp, Tramp, Tramp.
Easter is one of those holidays that resists secularization unless you have children, grandchildren, hard boiled eggs and a rainbow of pastel dyes.
People don't casually say "Happy Easter" to one another, particularly in an urban American city and especially if half your family is Jewish.
Still, Easter reminds me that I used to be a practicing Protestant and that my values derive substantially from the liberal Christian teachings I was dipped into as a child -- first in Sunday School and then in church.
What did I learn? Tolerance. Compassion. Empathy. Forgiveness. Reconciliation. And perhaps most important of all, the genuine potential for every ordinary human spirit to experience a radical transformation -- so radical that one might say the individual had been reborn as a spiritual being.
Listen, this is not light weight stuff.
I like to write, but I'm no philosopher. Nor am I writer with a huge brain, steadily empathic heart, encyclopedic knowledge, original thought or the courage to dream paradigm shifting dreams. I do know that writer, however. His name is Ken Cloke and I am steadily making my way through all 500 and something pages of his new book.
These are the times to put our own individual highly personal spiritual or religious faith and a great deal of our material resources behind the transformation of human understanding necessary to save the species. (as James Lovelock , author of Gaia instructed us, we have no need to worry about the persistence of the planet itself. We are not necessary to its survival; we are merely its "spokesmodels.")
As my personal Easter offering, I give you yet another excerpt from Ken's soon-to-be-released book Conflict Revolution - Mediating Evil, War, Injustice and Terrorism or How Mediators Can Help Save the Planet.
How Prejudice Works, and How to Oppose It
Prejudice is complex and operates on many levels. It can be found not only in insults and judgments, caricatures and stereotypes, but refusals to listen and communicate, stories of demonization and victimization, inability to experience empathy with others, and infinitesimal denials of humanity. It is reflected in personal selfishness and hostile relationships, bullying and aggressive behaviors, and ego compensations based on poor self-esteem. It is expressed through contempt, disregard, and domination, as well as through low status, inequitable pay, and autocratic power.
Prejudice commonly operates by stereotyping. People form stereotypes, in my experience, in eight easy steps:
1. Pick a characteristic
2. Blow it out of proportion
3. Collapse the person into the characteristic
4. Ignore individual differences and variations
5. Disregard subtleties and complexities
6. Overlook commonalities
7. Match it to your own worst fears
8. Make it cruel
If these steps routinely produce prejudice, it is possible to undo them, for example, by making people more complex than their stereotype permits, or distinguishing unique individuals within a group, or recognizing commonalities between people. It helps, in doing so, to acknowledge that everyone is equal, unique, and interesting; that everyone forms prejudices; that everyone can learn to overcome them through awareness, empathy, and communication; and that everyone can become more skillful in communicating across stereotypes and lines of separation created by fear.
It is common for people, when accused of prejudice, to respond defensively, but to confront other people’s prejudices aggressively, leveling accusations and instilling shame. These responses may initially succeed in suppressing the expression of prejudicial attitudes and undermining social permission and the cultures of discrimination that allow it to continue. But to root out the deep-seated biases that keep prejudice alive, it is necessary to dismantle it at a deeper level, in people’s hearts and minds.Our principal goals in responding to prejudice are therefore not to castigate, blame, or point fingers at those who exhibit prejudicial attitudes, as shaming and blaming merely triggers defensiveness and counterattack. Instead, they are to defuse prejudice by assisting those in its grip (including ourselves) to:
